Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...

as well as his

teaching Teaching is the practice implemented by a ''teacher'' aimed at transmitting skills (knowledge, know-how, and interpersonal skills) to a learner, a student, or any other audience in the of an educational institution. Teaching is closely related ...

with David C. Evans in that subject at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (the U, U of U, or simply Utah) is a public university, public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret (Book of Mormon), Deseret by the General A ...

in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...

from the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

in 1988 for the invention of the

Sketchpad Sketchpad (a.k.a. Robot Draftsman) is a computer program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis, for which he received the Turing Award in 1988, and the Kyoto Prize in 2012. It pioneered human–computer interaction ...

, an early predecessor to the sort of

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

, as well as the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

among many other major awards. In 2012, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces".

Early life and education

Sutherland's father was from New Zealand; his mother, Anne Sutherland, was from Scotland. His family moved to

Wilmette, Illinois Wilmette is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. Bordering Lake Michigan, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Skokie, Northfield, Glenview, and Evanston, Illinois, it is located north of Chicago's downtown district. Wilmette had a populatio ...

, then

Scarsdale, New York Scarsdale is a Administrative divisions of New York#Town, town in Westchester County, New York, United States. The Town of Scarsdale is coterminous municipality, coextensive with the Village of Scarsdale, but the community has opted to operate ...

, for his father's career. Bert Sutherland was his elder brother. Ivan Sutherland earned his

bachelor's degree A bachelor's degree (from Medieval Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six years ...

in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, his master's degree from

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private university, private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small g ...

, and his Ph.D. from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

in 1963. Sutherland invented

in 1962 while at MIT.

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

signed on to supervise Sutherland's computer drawing thesis. Among others on his thesis committee were

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive scientist, cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

and Steven Coons. Sketchpad was an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer.

Career and research

From 1963 to 1965, after he received his PhD, he served in the U.S. Army, commissioning as an officer through the ROTC program at Carnegie Institute of Technology. As a first lieutenant, Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency's

Information Processing Techniques Office The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research",Lyon, Matthew; Hafner, Katie (1999-08-19). ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (p. 39). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. was par ...

(IPTO), when Licklider took a job at IBM in 1964. From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an associate professor of electrical engineering at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. Work with student Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. In 1968, with his students Bob Sproull, Quintin Foster, Danny Cohen, and others he created the first head-mounted display that rendered images for the viewer's changing pose, as sensed by The Sword of Damocles, thus making the first

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...

system. A prior system,

Sensorama The Sensorama was a machine that is one of the earliest known examples of immersive, multi-sensory (now known as multimodal) technology. This technology, which was introduced in 1962 by Morton Heilig, is considered one of the earliest virtual re ...

, used a

head-mounted display A head-mounted display (HMD) is a display device, worn on the head or as part of a helmet (see helmet-mounted display for aviation applications), that has a small display optic in front of one (monocular HMD) or each eye (binocular vision, bi ...

to play back static video and other sensory stimuli. The optical see-through head-mounted display used in Sutherland's VR system was a stock item used by U.S. military helicopter pilots to view video from cameras mounted on the helicopter's belly. From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the

. Among his students there were

Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox ...

, inventor of the

Smalltalk Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learni ...

language, Gordon W. Romney (computer and cybersecurity scientist), who rendered the first 3D images at U of U, Henri Gouraud, who devised the

Gouraud shading Gouraud shading ( ), named after Henri Gouraud (computer scientist), Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by Polygon mesh, polygon meshes. In practice, Gouraud ...

technique, Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods, Jim Clark, founder of

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

, Henry Fuchs, and

Edwin Catmull Edwin Earl Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist and animator who served as the co-founder of Pixar and the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, ...

, co-founder of

Pixar Pixar (), doing business as Pixar Animation Studios, is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Pixar is a subsidiary of Walt Disney ...

and now president of

Walt Disney Walter Elias Disney ( ; December 5, 1901December 15, 1966) was an American animator, film producer, voice actor, and entrepreneur. A pioneer of the Golden age of American animation, American animation industry, he introduced several develop ...

and Pixar Animation Studios. In 1968 he co-founded

Evans & Sutherland Evans & Sutherland is an American computer graphics firm founded in 1968 by David C. Evans (computer scientist), David Evans and Ivan Sutherland. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums. Its simulation b ...

with his friend and colleague David C. Evans. The company did pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated

3D computer graphics 3D computer graphics, sometimes called Computer-generated imagery, CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional Computer-generated imagery, computer graphics, are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian coor ...

, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans & Sutherland included the future founders of

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

(

John Warnock John Edward Warnock (October 6, 1940 – August 19, 2023) was an American computer scientist, inventor, technology businessman, and philanthropist best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, wit ...

) and

( Jim Clark). From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

, where he was the founding head of that school's computer science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased in 1990 by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs. Sutherland was a fellow and vice president at

. Sutherland was a visiting scholar in the computer science division at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

(fall 2005 – spring 2008). Since 2009, Sutherland and Roncken have led the research in

Asynchronous Systems The primary focus of this article is asynchronous control in digital electronic systems. In a synchronous system, operations ( instructions, calculations, logic, etc.) are coordinated by one, or more, centralized clock signals. An asynchr ...

Portland State University Portland State University (PSU) is a public research university in Portland, Oregon, United States. It was founded in 1946 as a post-secondary educational institution for World War II veterans. It evolved into a four-year college over the next ...

.CV of Ivan Sutherland

Awards and honors

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

Fellow "for the Sketchpad computer-aided design system and for lifelong contributions to computer graphics and education", 2005 * R&D 100 Award, 2004 (team) * IEEE John von Neumann Medal, 1998 * Elected a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

in 1994 *

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an American international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1990 to promote Internet civil liberties. It provides funds for legal defense in court, ...

EFF Pioneer Award, 1994EFF Pioneer
*

ACM Software System Award The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded b ...

, 1993 * Honorary

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

from the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

(1986). *

, 1988 *

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is a computer magazine published since 1967 aimed at information technology (IT) and Business computing, business technology professionals. Original a print magazine, ''Computerworld'' published its final pr ...

Honors Program, Leadership Award, 1987 * * Elected a member of the

of the United States in 1978 *

member 1973 "for creative contributions in computer science and computer graphics, particularly in the study of the interfaces between men and machines" *

Kyoto Prize The is Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences. It is given not only to those that are top representatives of their own respective fields, but to "those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, ...

2012, in the category of advanced technology. *

National Inventors Hall of Fame The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is an American not-for-profit organization, founded in 1973, which recognizes individual engineers and inventors who hold a US patent of significant technology. Besides the Hall of Fame, it also operate ...

Inductee, 2016. * Washington Award, 2018 *

BBVA Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (), better known by its initialism BBVA, is a Spanish multinational financial services company based in Bilbao, with operative offices in Madrid. It is one of the largest financial institutions in the world, ...

Fronteras del conocimiento 2019.

Quotes

* "A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland." * "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal." * When asked: "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?", Sutherland replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard." * "It’s not an idea until you write it down." * "Without the fun, none of us would go on!"

Patents

Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:
US Patent 7,636,361 (2009) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication with flow control

US Patent 7,417,993 (2008) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication

US Patent 7,384,804 (2008) Method and apparatus for electronically aligning capacitively coupled mini-bars

US patent 3,889,107 (1975) System of polygon sorting by dissection

US patent 3,816,726 (1974) Computer Graphics Clipping System for Polygons

US patent 3,732,557 (1973) Incremental Position-Indicating System

US patent 3,684,876 (1972) Vector Computing System as for use in a Matrix Computer

US patent 3,639,736 (1972) Display Windowing by Clipping

Publications

2004 from "CAD software – history of CAD CAM" by CADAZZ *Sutherland's 1963 Ph.D. Thesis from

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

republished in 2003 by University of Cambridge as Technical Report Number 574,
Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System
'. His thesis supervisor was

, father of

information theory Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, ...

.
Duchess Chips for Process-Specific Wire Capacitance Characterization, The
by Jon Lexau, Jonathan Gainsley, Ann Coulthard and Ivan E. Sutherland, Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-2001-100, October 2001
Technology And Courage
by Ivan Sutherland, Sun Microsystems Laboratories Perspectives Essay Series, Perspectives-96-1 (April 1996) *
Counterflow Pipeline Processor Architecture
by Ivan E. Sutherland, Charles E. Molnar ( Charles Molnar), and Robert F. Sproull ( Bob Sproull), Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-94-25, April 1994
Oral history interview with Ivan Sutherland
at

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Sutherland describes his tenure as head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1963 to 1965. He discusses the existing programs as established by J. C. R. Licklider and the new initiatives started while he was there: projects in graphics and networking, the

ILLIAC IV The ILLIAC IV was the first massively parallel computer. The system was originally designed to have 256 64-bit floating-point units (FPUs) and four central processing units (CPUs) able to process 1 billion operations per second. Due to budget cons ...

, and the Macromodule program.

Personal life

On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken. He has two children. His elder brother, Bert Sutherland, was also a computer science researcher.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sutherland, Ivan American computer scientists American software engineers 1938 births Living people Computer graphics professionals Computer graphics researchers Internet pioneers Virtual reality pioneers Engineers from California Scientists from California Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Sun Microsystems people Turing Award laureates California Institute of Technology faculty Harvard University faculty University of Utah faculty California Institute of Technology alumni Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni Scarsdale High School alumni People from Hastings, Nebraska People from Scarsdale, New York 20th-century American engineers 21st-century American engineers 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists Scientists from New York (state) American people of Scottish descent Engineers from New York (state) Engineers from Nebraska American people of New Zealand descent UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology Inventors from Nebraska 1994 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery